The burying ground of St. Mary’s Church on a Harlow Hill marks the resting place of a number of the borough’s notables, eccentrics - and worse. This curious tomb belongs to Bartholomew Plarr - a mathematician and one-time master at Harlow school, who also dabbled in astronomy. It is the latter which, oddly enough, led him to espouse an occult-inflected early variant of antinatalist philosophy, claiming that the mass of humanity were “nobodies dwelling in an abysmal nowhere within a swirling cesspit universe of crepuscular nothingness”. Not only did this earn him some small degree of notoriety amongst the Harlow intellectuals of the time, but caused him to lose his position at Harlow school.
The lid of Plarr’s tomb is inscribed with what was apparently a self-penned epitaph, which the gloomy philosopher-mathematician prepared in advance of his demise. It reads:
“I will no longer countenance the presence of this or any other possible world”
Many have taken this statement to mean that, in death, Plarr believed he would no longer suffer the anguish or ignominy of existence - corporeal or otherwise. Those familiar with the more esoteric dimensions of Plarr’s mathematical, astronomical and philosophical investigations into the nature of the world and being have, however, chosen to interpret it - somewhat chillingly - as a threat.
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